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travel with them, inviolate as a pea in a pod, all the way around the globe. When it was darkest night in New South Wales, the timekeeper would still be striking noon at Greenwich.
    In its inner workings Mr Kendall’s timekeeper was the descendant of the brass insect slowly beating its wings that Dr Vickery had shown Rooke as a boy, but in shape this one was like any pocket watch, except that it was the size of a soup plate. It was a nice bit of wit on the part of the watchmaker, Rooke thought, to have made this gigantic thing as if it could be hung from some colossal waistcoat pocket.
    With Barton and Rooke standing close by in case the ship lurched, the commodore lifted the timekeeper out of its nest and removed the pair-case, revealing the busy secretive mechanism within, the wheels twitching time forward tooth by tooth. He took the winding key from its slot in the box, inserted it into the hole in the back of the workings, and turned it. Then he replaced the case and slipped the thing back between its cushions.
    As the regulation stipulated, the sentinel was called in and each of the men told him in turn: The timekeeper has been wound . When the sentinel had heard the words from each of them—and only then—he moved aside from the door and allowed them to leave.
    The rigmarole was wonderfully droll, Rooke thought. If he had seen it, Silk would have had the mess highly entertained, imitating the way Rooke solemnly mouthed: The timekeeper has been wound to the wooden-faced sentinel who had already been told it twice.
    There was another thing about the ritual of the winding. Rooke was the lowliest sort of officer, a man of no importance. But during those few minutes in the cabin, rank was nothing. For that time, the astronomer Rooke was the equal of the commodore himself.
    In fine weather, the whole business was redundant. But when sextants could not find the sun or moon in cloud, or the ship pitched too wildly to fix a sighting, the timekeeper, still faithfully telling the time in Greenwich even after months at sea, might be all that protected them from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of New South Wales.

    Botany Bay proved itself immediately impossible as a place of settlement, so the commodore directed the fleet a few miles further north. It had taken nearly nine months to arrive at New South Wales: what could such a short distance further matter?
    From the sea it looked as though the commodore had made a mistake. Rooke and Gardiner leaned on the rail watching as Sirius skewed to port and led the fleet towards what seemed nomore than a notch in a high yellow cliff. They heard the sheets rattle in the blocks as the sails were slanted and Sirius headed for the maelstrom of white water at its base.
    But the commodore had not been mistaken. Beyond the cliff an enormous body of quiet water curved away to the west. Sirius glided past bays lined with crescents of yellow sand and headlands of dense forest. There was something about this vast hidden harbour—bay after perfect bay, headland after shapely headland—that put Rooke in a trance. He felt he could have travelled along it forever into the heart of this unknown land. It was the going forward that was the point, not the arriving, the water creaming away under the bow, drawn so deeply along this crack in the continent that there might never be any need to stop.
    As Sirius rounded a rocky island, Rooke saw men running along the shore, shaking spears. He could hear them on the wind calling the same word over and over: Warra! Warra! He did not think that they were calling Welcome! Welcome! He suspected a polite translation might be something like Go to the Devil!
    With a rumbling rattle and splash the anchor was let go. When Rooke looked again, the men had gone.
    They were anchored at the mouth of a small cove, sheltered by high ridges on either side. At the head of the bay was a slip of sand where a stream flowed into the cove. Behind it a shallow wooded valley ran